It's a gorgeous book with photos and quotes from all the Trek series. Writer Andrew Fazekas explains real science behind the sci-fi, from super giants to the possibility of alien life, while also bouncing back and forth between tiny bits of Trek minutiae. It doesn't bog down like the evil pudding that killed Tasha Yar, though. It's thorough and clever, and just fun.

For example: It explains emission nebulae while discussing The Wrath of Khan. It contains night sky charts and explains quasars in plain English (Klingon would also have been acceptable.)

The book begins, as anything Trek must aspire to do, with William Shatner. He says, "Science fictions give us a taste of what it might be like to grasp the yet unknowable."

Such knowledge in this book offers us all the chance to achieve true Shatneity.

“We generally addressed it with a shrug and the attitude, ‘Hey, it's the future.” -- Chris Black, about the Star Trek writers room.

This is an incredibly smart, exhaustive look at how economics works in Star Trek. This, THIS is the kind of thing geekiness was made for.

The very first chapter deals with a question that probably most of us Trek watchers had early on: What happened to money?

The book is slavish in its details, with quotes and commentary about minute Trek matters, with the kind of modern geek thought that we have been scribbling in notebooks for years. Or blogs. Anything with a blank page.

This whole book reminds me of TREK, a collection of fan-magazine commentaries that were collected in paperback. Those were thought-pieces on geeky matters before there was a label for such things. This book is that, too, just phaser-focused.

This book has a whole chapter devoted to Ferengi culture. And another to the replicator. You need this book right now.